Jesus Saves
Wednesday night I volunteered at the rescue mission serving food to the homeless and those in rehab. It's something I always think about doing around the holiday season, but the last two year's spots have filled up too fast for my lack of initiative. But I got a spot this year, and I had no idea what to expect.
First impression walking up to the building...I totally wore the wrong thing. I was wearing my clothes from the concert I saw the night before - and while nothing was skin tight, everything felt too formfitting walking by about 50 homeless men lined up on the street. I wanted to shrivel up into myself and disappear; word to the wise - wear baggy clothes. I felt even more nervous when I got the "don't give out any personal information like your name, where you're from, where you're staying, where you went to school" speech. Ugghhhh...
Then I learned more. All of the people who stay there are part of a rehab program in which they can be for up to two years. They live there and work there. I end up working in the kitchen prepping trays of food to be served - and I'm working with two men in the program. They are nice and friendly - they have classes on relationships and how to talk to people. We served 250 hot meals of turkey, stuffing, mashed topatoes, gravy, veggies, salad and bananas! This was no prison food, it looked yummy!
I am so impressed by people who get addicted, hit rock bottom and then actually have the nads to get their poop in a group, join a program, and get clean. I don't know the strength that must take. My lawyer brother says 75% of those that get clean don't stay clean but I don't care. I am so impressed by the 25%. I have never been addicted but even without that, I am such a glutton and hedonist - that if I had the addiction gene I'd be totally effed.
The first round of people being served is staying there and in the program. The second round is people from surrounding shelters and chapels. And lastly they open the doors to anyone left outside: those living on the streets. Why are 95% of homeless people men? Any ideas?
I spend a lot of the time serving, wondering what everyone thinks of me. Wondering how they feel about the little blond girl from the suburbs who decides to volunteer for something a couple of times a year so she can feel all righteous about the world. And then as I'm leaving with the other three volunteers at 9pm at the end of the dinner, I hear a couple of shouts "thank you ladies, we really appreciated it!"
"You're welcome!"
posted by chinchilla @ 8:21 AM
3 Comments:
I have some unsavoury theories that may speak to your question, though I hardly consider them scientific, not being an experienced social worker or having seen the studies (possibly because there aren't any). For better or worse, and pretty much for the worse, it seems that women have one last desperate money-generating option when they're down on their luck that is not available to men (except possibly when they're young), and that could be the difference between being really really poor and being homeless.
Speaking of young people (squeegee kids, as they're affectionately known in Toronto), it seems like there are a lot more women/girls on the street in that age group than in others, possibly because it takes time before life beats you down so much that unsavoury options become tempting.
Yay happy topic.
That's pretty much the only conclusion I could come up with. With some added factors like, women's families might be more forgiving and helpful, and maybe women are more likely to seek help and stay in shelters and halfway houses.
Are the Squeegee kids still mean? I remember some that would squeegee whether you gave them permission or not and then cuss at you or hit your car if you didn't pay up.
Well, there's not that many left in Toronto to begin with. A few years ago, the council decided that the best way to deal with them would be to have the cops harass them until they got lost. Some sort of morbid moral victory was declared when they were observed "hitchhiking to Montreal" in large numbers, briefly exposing the farce that is our allegedly socially progressive nation. Yeah, they were pretty unpleasant for the most part - angry and aggressive, which makes it hard to feel sympathy, but then I'm not sure that we should expect humility from young people who have few prospects and less hope. It's a chicken and egg sort of thing, I guess - they're antisocial because it's the only self-determinism they can afford and society won't help them to achieve anything else because they're antisocial. As a community we ought to decide what and how much to offer them to see if they go along with it before deciding to run them out of town, the individual answers being directly related to where one sits on the political spectrum. Unfortunately, it seems that the first thing that the city did was run them out of town.
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